By the end of his career Haydn was called “the father of the symphony,” likewise “father of the string quartet.” This is not to say that he invented either genre. Rather he took them up as relatively minor pieces and left them, respectively, the king of instrumental works and the king of chamber music. The sort of depth and scope that Beethoven, Brahms, and our time associate with the symphony, is what Haydn created in his last dozen, written for large halls and big audiences during his English sojourn.

In its variety and impact, Symphony No. 73 in D Major, from 1781, known as La Chasse, “The Hunt,” for its last movement, is moving in the direction of Haydn’s final group. Still, it and its contemporaries were written for a small orchestra playing in the music room of a mansion or a palace: flute, oboes, bassoons, horns, trumpets (in the outer movements), and strings.

In its variety and impact, Symphony No. 73 in D Major, from 1781, known as La Chasse, “The Hunt,” for its last movement, is moving in the direction of Haydn’s final group. Still, it and its contemporaries were written for a small orchestra playing in the music room of a mansion or a palace: flute, oboes, bassoons, horns, trumpets (in the outer movements), and strings.

There follows a wry and ironic minuet, faster than the usual dance derived movement, reminding us that in some of his quartets Haydn speeded up the minuet and invented the scherzo. So far in the symphony he has kept up a good-humored atmosphere in various modes of delight. In the finale, which he adapted from one of his opera overtures, matters spill over into a dashing romp in what the time would instantly hear as a “hunting” vein, complete with lusty horns and pounding timpani. We seem to be hunting on horseback, and having a splendid time of it. In the end, after a final shout from the horns, we’re given a gentle finish.

Back in Vienna, when a friend asked if he’d done
something big over the summer – a concerto? a quartet? Brahms
replied,

He was again talking about the Fourth Symphony.

Like any composer, Brahms worried about the reception of a new work. He was more anxious than usual about the Fourth. His previous two symphonies had scored immediate successes. Meanwhile Brahms perhaps suspected he did not have a Fifth in him. In its tone and import, the Fourth was the darkest and most densely crafted symphonic work he had put before the public. His relief was manifest when its early performances, starting in Meiningen on October 25, 1885, found tremendous acclaim.

The symphony’s inception went back several years. In 1880 Brahms played friends a bass line from a Bach cantata, on which Bach had built a chaconne, a dance-derived work consisting of variations over a repeated bass pattern. Brahms queried, ”What would you think of a symphonic movement written on this theme
someday?” Thus the finale of the Fourth. For that movement he was clearly thinking of another model as well, Bach’s searing Chaconne in D minor for solo violin, of which Brahms once wrote:

All these are clues to how Brahms conceived the Fourth Symphony, a work of whose expressive import he never spoke directly. Instead, he said: the cherries never get ripe in these mountains; writing a piece like Bach’s chaconne would drive me mad.

How do his hints play out in the Fourth Symphony in E Minor? Three of its movements are in minor, or a haunting, minor-tinted major. Meanwhile as he often did, Brahms concealed some truth behind the irony when he called the symphony “a bunch of polkas and waltzes.” Most of the music reflects, however distantly, the rhythms and gestures of dance. Three of the dances, however, are hardly blithe ones.

This blog is an extract from Jan Swafford’s article in the programme for our concert Vienna 1897: Brahms’ Last concert at the Southbank Centre on 24 June.